Reims crowned 33 French kings between 816 and 1825, and its history runs from Roman Durocortorum to the surrender that ended WWII in Europe. Three days of Gallo-Roman gates, Carolingian relics, chalk crayères and 1918 ruins rebuilt in Art Deco.
The Porte de Mars is the widest surviving Roman arch in the world (32 m wide, 13 m high, 3rd century AD), when Reims was Durocortorum, capital of Gallia Belgica. Ten minutes south, the Cryptoportique on Place du Forum is the buried gallery of the Roman forum.
Consecrated 1049, this 122 m Romanesque nave holds the tomb of Saint Remigius, the bishop who baptised Clovis around 498 and started the coronation tradition. The Holy Ampulla of chrism used to anoint kings was kept here until revolutionaries smashed it in 1793.
Housed in the 17th-century abbey buildings beside the basilica, this museum runs from Palaeolithic flints through the Gallo-Roman tombs of Durocortorum to the Arch of Mars sculptures and the abbey's medieval chapter house with Romanesque capitals.
Ruinart, founded 1729 and the world's oldest champagne house, ages its bottles 38 m down in Gallo-Roman chalk pits dug in the 4th century to quarry building stone. The pyramid-shaped crayères are UNESCO-listed alongside the Reims hillsides.
At 02:41 on 7 May 1945, Generaloberst Jodl signed the unconditional German surrender in this technical-college map room, Eisenhower's SHAEF headquarters. The wall maps are exactly as they were that night, down to the pencilled front lines.
Nine km southeast on the RD944, this 1883 fort held the German line for the whole of WWI while Reims burned. It houses the Friese collection of some 560 German helmets, plus trench artefacts from the Champagne offensives.
Built 1904–1908 for champagne broker Henry Vasnier, this Art Nouveau–Art Deco villa was restored by Vranken and reopened in 2008. It sits on Boulevard Lundy, the champagne-magnate street where Pommery and Veuve Clicquot built their mansions.
Andrew Carnegie funded this 1921–1928 library to replace the one destroyed in the shelling that levelled 80% of Reims. The Art Deco reading room has a Jacques Simon glass dome, Sèvres mosaics and marble from four countries — a monument to reconstruction money.
Built 1919–1930 with Rockefeller Foundation money for war-ravaged working families, this garden city of 617 houses was a social experiment: no bars allowed, communal gardens compulsory. Its Foyer Rémois centre and Saint-Nicaise church anchor the estate.
Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita converted to Catholicism in Reims in 1959 after a vision in the Basilique Saint-Rémi, then designed and frescoed this chapel himself in 1966, aged 80. He and his wife are buried inside beneath his own murals.
The city's fine-arts collection covers Reims through Corot, the Le Nain brothers and 27 Renaissance Cranach panels. The surrounding streets hold the 1545 Hôtel de la Salle, one of the few Renaissance townhouses to survive 1914–18.
Reims' main promenade shows the 1920s reconstruction in one sweep: Art Deco façades, the 1906 Subé fountain with its gilded winged Victory, and cafés where the biscuit rose de Reims — made here since 1756 — is still dunked in champagne.